Publish an Official App Packaging Roadmap
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@girish It would be really helpful to know on a quarterly basis what apps will be officially packaged in the upcoming quarter and what apps will be deprecated. While votes on the App Wishlist are part of that decision, I'm sure there are other considerations as well. Knowing the team's intent would be helpful in planning our own activities and whether Cloudron can be leveraged to host specific software platforms. I also recognize that bugs, security issues, platform enhancements, etc. can limit the core team's ability to package apps and for that reason, timelines can change. But knowing what is first, second, third on the "intent list" would be a good start.
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I don’t think upvoting has any real impact on whether an app gets packaged. Most of the upvoting is done by the forum regulars and that’s not a wide enough pool to base a decision on. Have we seen more than 30 upvotes ever? An intent/interest list would be nice though.
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@humptydumpty Actually, many have gotten more than 30 votes. Some have already been packaged and are currently available. Here is the App Wishlist sorted by votes: https://forum.cloudron.io/category/5/app-wishlist?sort=most_votes
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@crazybrad I stand corrected. Cool beans.
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In the spirit of being grateful for what we have (U.S. Thanksgiving holiday), I would like to reconsider my previous post about the lack of new business applications and the App Wishlist in general.
The Cloudron team does an amazing job with their limited resources and after going through a well-documented, flawless upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 on two Cloudrons, I am appreciating the quality of what we have. So while wanting more of a good thing is an easy trap to fall into, creating and sustaining a good thing is not.
So I will trust in the team that has delivered for us time after time and will be delighted by App Wish list surprises when they appear.
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@crazybrad I think the community needs to get more involved in the app packaging and bounties might be the best solution to have more business oriented apps on here. I’d like to see more ecommerce cms on here. I haven’t done much hw simply because most of the best ones are headless and that also applies to me when it comes to such stuff. There has to be a leaner solution than WP/Woo.
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@humptydumpty Interesting suggestions. I am thinking that we don't understand the long-term implications of adding an app to the Cloudron App store. App packaging is the first "investment" required, but who will monitor new releases? Once a release is issued, who will adapt it again?
There are various different ways the community can help. App packaging is a good one. Money is another. It is also possible that the Cloudron team is happy with the way things are going and growing is not something they can (or wish to do) at this point in time. I for one am trying to be patient while they figure this out. They have a community willing to help. And when they are ready, they will remind us of all our offers of time, money and chocolate chip cookies to get the job done.
With respect to WP/Woo, right now the WordPress ecosystem is a nightmare. With WordPress.org and WPEngine at each others' throats, the community is really suffering. My company is sitting on the sidelines and waiting for all of this to sort out.
FWIW, we have used Shopify for eCommerce and it works well. It is not open source and requires a monthly subscription. You might also want to look at Stripe. They have many tools that might allow you to make your website eCommerce-ready at a simple level. While not open source, they are essentially free (you just pay for CC processing). We just helped a client add tshirts to their website using only a payment link as an integration point. Stripe handled the cart process, address, even size (S/M/L/XL). Even major corporations are using Stripe for their superior card acceptance processes.
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@crazybrad thanks for the recommendations. I’m familiar with them both, but they wouldn’t work for my use cases.
As for app packaging, if I’m not mistaken, Cloudron staff take over and handle any future updates if it’s added to the App Store. I don’t expect every niche app will get adopted but the highly voted/starred apps that fill a gap in CR’s ecosystem will have a higher chance.
CR could enhance/simply how custom repos/apps are added. Some of the regulars on here have shared their own packaged apps, but the process isn’t clear to me yet. That’s something worth looking into though. Sigh, too much to do and not enough time!
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@humptydumpty said in Publish an Official App Packaging Roadmap:
As for app packaging, if I’m not mistaken, Cloudron staff take over and handle any future updates if it’s added to the App Store. I don’t expect every niche app will get adopted but the highly voted/starred apps that fill a gap in CR’s ecosystem will have a higher chance.
CR could enhance/simply how custom repos/apps are added. Some of the regulars on here have shared their own packaged apps, but the process isn’t clear to me yet. That’s something worth looking into though. Sigh, too much to do and not enough time!
That's the main difference to platforms like Yunohost, where you have a ton of user packaged apps.... - that don't work, break, become unmaintained etc.
